BIO

My creative practice is ideas and research-led and fuses creative non-fiction; traditional and digital printmaking techniques, photography, bookmaking, video and sound and 3-dimensional work. I'm interested in how we are located (and locate ourselves) in the world, notions of space and place and ideas of belonging. A lot of my work - in art and writing - is about nature, flora and fauna, and rooted in the highlands of Scotland, where I'm at my happiest.

I graduated with a first class BA(hons) degree in Fine Art (Printmaking) from the Glasgow School of Art, and completed a Master of Fine Arts (studio) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. I have previous degrees in the social sciences, including an MA(hons) in sociology and social and economic history from the University of Edinburgh.

In 2013 I completed a PhD in interdisciplinary arts practice from the University of the Highlands and Islands/ University of Aberdeen, sponsored by the Forestry Commission, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the University of the Highlands and Islands. This PhD explored some of the forests of the North of Scotland, more specifically Abernethy Forest, and Culbin and the forests of Morayshire, and how we come to know them. Drawing on contemporary art history and practice, human geography and anthropology in particular, and with a (walking) ethnographic element feeding into my arts practice, the PhD is entitled In the forest, field and studio: art/ making/ methodology and the more-than-written in the rendering of place

My first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, which a collection of found words from 19th century Scottish Dictionaries, is published by Saraband Books (2018).

microbursts (February 2021), a collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder is a collection of lyric and intermedial essays, which started with Elizabeth's writing on illness, grief and crisis. Through our collaboration the work expanded to explorations of how design and visual interventions might alter the nature and impact of texts and how we might come to them. microbursts found its perfect home with Prototype Publishing

I'm a contributor to The Guardian newspaper's Country Diary

My writing can be found in the anthologies Antlers of Water, writing on the nature and environment of Scotland (ed. Kathleen Jamie); The Wild Isles (ed. Patrick Barkham), and Gifts of Gravity and Light, an almanac for the 21st century (Eds Anita Roy and Pippa Marland). More info about these and other creative non-fiction|essays etc. can be found here, and there might be more stuff on the news page

My second book, belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home was published by Canongate Books in August 2022.

belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home

Current Artist in Residence with Cairngorms Connect - a landscape restoration project with a 200-year vision to enhance habitats, species and ecological processes across a vast area within the Cairngorms National Park, with Elizabeth Reeder and Robbie Synge, funded by the Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Artists Residency.

I'm a lecturer in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Glasgow School of Art.